The first edition of Gary's abstract graphic novel, in A4 size, is available
here. View some sample pages
here.
Andrei Molotiu's back cover blurb:
Like the clouds with which its title rhymes, Gary J Shipley’s Shrouds allows us to see in its pages landscapes, faces and flying animals, that however never resolve into simply legible, unambiguous figures. Cave walls meld into wool skeins that in turn metamorphose into nocturnal fields, then into—yes—abstract shrouds of Turin or undecipherable fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls: an ink-made world full of suggestions just under the threshold of readability, a magnificent graphic text somewhere between (pictorial) abstraction and (literary) asemia, where the hovering shapes of Rothko or Still cohabitate with Henri Michaux’s graphomania and with the raw brushwork of the CoBrA artists.
SHROUDS is a series of glimpses of something which doesn't want to be seen, as if you're looking through fog or straining to see in dim light. Sketched rapidly, buzzing with energy. Many brushes were destroyed in the making of these works. From the chaos of hints of faces, bodies, landscapes, skies and scenes, a story or narrative will emerge for the reader who immerses her or himself in these pages.
Cover designed by Matthew Revert.
More about Gary
here.
